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Video: Artist Alice Bucknell on Water Politics and Speculative Futures in Los Angeles

Neale Stokes, Senior Librarian, Digital Content Team,
A computer-generated image of the Los Angeles River flowing through a concrete channel and passing under a bridge.

Alice Bucknell's video work, The Alluvials, was born of research in the Los Angeles Public Library. Now playing on the Library's immersive Central Library Video Wall, The Alluvials explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in a near-future version of Los Angeles. The story is told through a variety of nonhuman and elemental perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city's celebrity mountain lion, P-22.

In this video, Bucknell discusses the origins of Los Angeles' water crises, the rare texts that informed The Alluvials, and why the Library is an apt venue for this work.


Alice Bucknell is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator with a particular interest in game engines and speculative fiction. Their recent work has focused on creating cinematic universes within game worlds, exploring the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge.


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